Latest Releases

A European Federation Software Suite

UNICORE (Uniform Interface to Computing Resources) offers a ready-to-run system including client and server software. UNICORE makes distributed computing and data resources available in a seamless and secure way in intranets and the internet.

UNICORE has special characteristics that make it unique among middleware systems. The UNICORE design is based on several guiding principles, that serve as key objectives for further enhancements.

Latest news

30 Nov 2016

Enhanced UNICORE File Transfer released

UFTPD 2.4.0, UFTP File Transfer Client 0.6.0, and Auth 1.3.0 have been released. They offer support for user’s Unix groups and new commands such as mkdir and rm. The cp command behaves more like the Unix ‘cp’ with wildcards, multifile copy, and preservation of modification times. A new blog post shows how to use UFTP with standard Unix tools. Detailed change logs are available at UFTPD changes, UFTP Client changes, and Auth changes.

28 Oct 2016

Portal V2.2.0 released

The new version of the UNICORE Portal offers now support for workflow templates. In addition it supports the use of execution environments and provides more detailed information for the user. Further details are given in the change log.

26 Oct 2016

UNICORE @ SC’16

At this year’s Supercomputing Conference in Salt Lake City UNICORE is demonstrated at its own booth. Visit booth number 3366 and check out the new features of the UNICORE clients and services.

On the trail of brain-fibers

Use UNICORE to automate processes

From Single Molecule to Light Emission

Conquering the multi-scale problem using UNICORE

The human brain flagship

Use UNICORE for a unified access to the HPC Platform

10 reasons to use UNICORE

UNICORE comes with a history of more than 15 years. Originally initiated in the Supercomputing domain, today UNICORE is a general-purpose federation software suite. In its recent version, UNICORE follows the latest standards from the Grid and Web Services world and offers a rich set of features to its users.

Mature, well-proven federation software suite from Europe

Integrated solution for federations of HPC systems as well as Clusters and storage systems

Application integration mechanisms on the client, services and resource level

Mature workflow support

High troughput data transfer

Source code is available and easy to modify

Easily extensible with own developments

UNICORE is widely used in European and international Grid projects, initiatives, and infrastructures such as the Human Brain project (HBP), the US Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) and the Polish Grid Infrastructure (PL-Grid). Companies use UNICORE for automation and speed-up of modeling tasks, e.g. Nanomatch GmbH.

UNICORE offers an abstraction layer for compute and storage resources. The interfaces to the resources can easily be configured to properly interface all systems from high-end supercomputers with proprietary operating and resource management systems to commodity clusters or workstations with linux and e.g. Slurm resource management system. The same holds for storage systems such as Amazon S3, HDFS, OpenStack Swift and iRods.

Our committed team of developers guarantees for stable software. We are closely watching all support channels such as mailing lists and bug trackers to provide timely answers and fixes.

All components of UNICORE, clients and services, are available as installation packages or archive files. The configuration files are clearly structured and all basic options are pre-set. For other than test installations proper certificates, the machine names and target system specifics have to be added. A configuration tool is available for archive based installations, applying all settings for all services in one go.

Seamless access to the compute and storage resources is provided by an Eclipse-based graphical user client. It lets the user specify tasks from simple jobs to sophisticated workflows intuitively, including the necessary input and output data, and easily monitor job execution and output retrieval. The Web-portal offers similar functionality without having to install an application locally. Power users may use the command line interface providing a broad range of functions including administrative actions on services.

UNICORE is capable of supporting applications installed on the target systems. A description of the application with execution path on the target system, important parameter settings, and call parameters can be configured in the UNICORE execution service. On the client side such an applications can seamlessly be used in tasks by just specifying the necessary parameters.

The sophisticated UNICORE workflow support is extensible for different, domain-specific workflow languages and engines. Users can model workflows in a data or control flow centric fashion supported by commonplace control-structures.

UNICORE is completely written in Java and open source. The sources are available at Sourceforge.

Developers are welcome to join the UNICORE developer community and contribute their code with the option of integration in official releases.

UNICORE is used in e-infrastructures of any nature and without limitations on the type of computing resource. Single PCs, cluster systems interconnected similar to the EGI Grid infrastructure to leadership HPC systems like the once forming the PRACE Research Infrastructure and the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) are supported as well as a variety of storage types. Data management functionality includes high-performance file transfer and metadata handling. UNICORE‘s flexible security architecture enables many usage scenarios.